Kick the Tories out!

Liz Truss, elevated to prime minister by the votes of 81,000 Tory party members to the horror of the wider electorate, is trying to make a turn in policy defined even by more cautious Tories as unjust and unworkable.

She can do so only because MPs elected for five years are insulated from recall or accountability for those five years, and because even those elected MPs are usually more controlled by the prime minister than controlling. Once Liz Truss had won the Tory contest, she could appoint whom she liked to the ministries, and thus protect herself by a “payroll vote” against most challenges.

The Tories have forced a retreat on one element of Truss’s plans, the cut in the top income-tax rate which on her own admission was never discussed even by the Cabinet. Leading Tories are pressing Truss to honour the uprating of benefits in line with inflation in April 2023. On 4 October, Truss refused to say she trusts Kwarteng, before saying she did after all. The essence remains: big tax cuts for the rich and business, token tax cuts for the worse-off, and lifting the lid on bankers’ bonuses, all on the promise that this will bribe the rich into generating “growth”, and gains from that growth will eventually trickle down to the rest of us.

The promised growth, besides, is heavily in fracking, other oil and gas extraction, and financial money-churning business, growth which stunts our chances of minimising environmental destruction.

Some Tory MPs have talked of ousting Truss only days after she took office. The structures of British “constitutional monarchy” make that difficult short of crack-up. The prime minister, carrying much of the “constitutional” power of the monarch, controls parliament more than parliament controls the minister. The Tories eventually moved against Boris Johnson after long discredit and floundering. Truss has sought to escape the floundering by a lurch of policy.

The Labour Party should declare it recognises no right for the Tories to pursue Truss’s lurch without a fresh election, and refuse ordinary parliamentary cooperation with the Tories. (Labour MPs did that briefly in November 1980, over council rent rises imposed by the Tory government, and later on occasions in 1984, 1985, and 1988).

The chief way to call the Tories to account is to step up the strikes.

In early 1974, the Tory government of Edward Heath, which had attempted a version of Thatcherism before Thatcher and been thwarted by strikes, resorted to an early election on the theme: “Who governs Britain — government or unions?”

Many voters sought a middle road — the Liberals’ vote went up from 7.5% to 19.3% — but Labour won that election with promises of a “social contract”, a new reconciliation between social classes, immediately undoing the worst Tory policies.

That attempt to manage capitalism would sour into Labour cuts and attempts to impose limits on wage rises.

The lesson for today: light a fire under the Tories, and match industrial combativity with a drive to transform Labour into a democratic alternative committed to working-class policies.